> Anyone complaining about Android fragmentation should ask themselves if they would prefer if every device would go the "Apple way" and make their very own operating systems for their device. Would this really solve fragmentation?

I, for instance, would prefer that the industry adopt six or eight standard screen sizes and stick the fuck with them. Google is in a position where it can mandate that, actually.

There are many excuses one can make in Google's favour, but this does not take away the fact that their development environment is very poor, primarily due to fragmentation (and then there's development tools and documentation, but those have been traditionally been a stumbling point).

Also, it's intelectually rude to try to rest your arguments on words for which you construct your own meaning. That's what salespeople do and it's a marginal improvement (in technique, not in correctness) of the straw man sophism.

> "operating system" is a very generic expression. For most people today an operating system is the software that is installed on the device minus applications that the user installed himself.

"Operating system" is a very clear expression that means exactly one thing.

Fragmentation can mean more things, and this article claims one of them. People who want to write software for the iOS operating system have a small set of screen sizes and resolutions to target. People who want to write software for the Android operating system have a fuckload of incompatible APIs, screen sizes and resolutions to target, which is exactly what fragmentation means. This is especially problematic for small apps: if you need 3 weeks to write the core of your application, and 1 day to tweak each combination of obscure resolution and screen size, strange device, hardware configuration range and API version you can easily end up doubling your development time.

Also, if you actually try your hand at writing an application with a decent UI, you'll find that the "a little" you want to tweak it is "a lot". In my experience, if you try to target a full set of platforms, ranging from small phones to full HD tablets, you actually end up designing 3 UIs from scratch (unless you want at least two of them to feel like someone stretched or compressed the other one to fit a screen it wasn't designed to). This includes entire sections of the UI logic (e.g. redesigning navigation flow), and while there are tools to help you with it (such as Fragments), it doesn't take away the pain.